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The Professional Use of Discord

Discord is a communication platform first released in 2015 that can be simultaneously used for text messaging and voice calling. Discord was also originally developed as a gaming platform, as noted by the designers themselves. This origin shows not only in the program’s affordances and design, but also in the general culture that surrounds the platform: one of informality, privacy, and self-policing. But while Discord has traditionally hosted (and indeed continues to host) a wide variety of gaming-focused groups, the COVID-19 pandemic has recently given the platform a boost in popularity, so much so that its marketing has shifted to reflect this surge of general-purpose users.

This recent transformation is something that I have personally watched occur. While I had used Discord before this semester to communicate within certain gaming groups, it was only during the pandemic that I and a group of other students used it as a main communication platform for school. Therefore, when our class began writing expert analyses about technology that we were using for education, I found myself interested in this "repurposed" platform. How well could a platform that was built around gaming function in a more professional context?

During my analysis, I did indeed find that there are many aspects of Discord that could be attributed to the platform’s increased popularity, particularly its increased popularity in formal contexts. For instance, I found that both written and spoken communication on the platform is not only intuitive but also very forgivable. In other words, the application makes sure that its most basic options (writing posts, attaching content) are always visible on the UI; functional shortcuts may and oftentimes do exist (images can be attached to posts using CTRL-V, for instance), but knowledge of them is never required to operate the program. In this way, Discord offers an approachability from many directions, a variety of ways for doing the same thing that each address a different proficiency level of user. This flexibility, present not only in post creation but also in speech conversations and content organization, is one of the main reasons that the platform has scaled as well as it has.

Unfortunately, this extensive variety causes Discord to suffer from several organizational faults. Even though basic functionality is repeated and thus very visible, configuring the platform’s more particular settings can be an exercise in frustration, mainly due to how modulated and distributed most of the options are. The example I most focused on in my analysis was channel (sub-chat) permissions: To set these options properly, one must ignore the visible gear that is always shown on the application and instead navigate to a per-server (per-chat) menu hidden in a dropdown box. One must then create the roles that will have different permissions, then leave that server menu and go to a separate channel menu to apply the detailed permissions to these roles. Ultimately, it’s confusing—there are too many steps in too many different locations, even assuming that one can properly and easily find every option that they need.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Discord’s presence and history as a gaming application, as something unprofessional. The platform affords many features that, while neat or even useful in the context of gaming, only serve as distractions in professional use. These features range from emoji reactions to live updates on what games users are playing—and even though most can be turned off, Discord by default assumes that its users will want to use them and thus immediately gives all users access. While dozens of other social media platforms can also be used for gaming, this assumption of purpose pervades Discord, even down to its more playful visual design. This may not matter much to small and informal workgroups, but the visibility of the platform’s original purpose remains a deal-breaker to more formal organizations. And ultimately, unless Discord completely overhauls its brand—and therefore makes it so that its longest and most prevalent users are alienated—this is a cultural feature about the application that will likely never change. The program fulfills a certain purpose, and it simply cannot be expanded to fulfill all purposes in the professional world without disregarding its original goal.

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